Lisbon during the 1755
earthquake, the Tagus River in the foreground. (Engraving
from National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering/Kozak
Collection)

The
effects of natural disasters are refracted through human societies,
with
differing results. Often they act as a stress test of a social
formation,
revealing inner weaknesses and fault lines, and in the case of a
decaying
society, thereby hastening its demise. In other cases, when such
traumatic
events occur at turning points in history they can act as a catalyst
for
profound ideological changes, thus contributing to future social
upheavals.
This was the case of the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1 November
1755, in
which it was said 100,000 people died, more than a third of the entire
population of the Portuguese capital.

Since
the earthquake took place on All Saints’ Day and destroyed most of the
city’s
major churches, reactionary priests blamed the destruction on Lisbon’s
supposed
sins. Inquisitors literally roamed the streets looking for heretics to
hang.
But the grip of the dead hand of the medieval church on society was
weakening
and eventually broke. Coming at a time when bourgeois forces were
growing
strong enough to burst the straitjacket of feudalism, the Lisbon
disaster
played a key role in the Enlightenment, intellectual forerunner for the
French
Revolution of 1789-1804.

Best-known
was the reaction of the French philosophe Voltaire
(François-Marie
Arouet). Voltaire responded to the Lisbon cataclysm, coming shortly
after
another deadly earthquake in Lima, Peru (1746), in a series of letters,
a
lengthy poem and the novella Candide, questioning blind faith
in god and
the fatalism that the then-dominant philosophy of “Optimism”
engendered. In the
preface to his “Poem on the Disaster in Lisbon” (1756) Voltaire wrote
mockingly: “‘All is well, the heirs of the dead will increase their
fortunes,
masons will make money rebuilding the buildings, beasts feed off the
bodies
buried in the debris: this is the necessary effect of the necessary
causes;
your particular misfortune is nothing, you will contribute to the
general
welfare’: such talk would have been as cruel as the earthquake was
dreadful.”

In
Candide (1759), Voltaire reported how, “After the
earthquake, which had
destroyed three-fourths of the city of Lisbon, the sages of that
country could
think of no means more effectual to preserve the kingdom from utter
ruin than
to entertain the people with an auto-da-fé,1 it having been decided by the University
of Coimbra,
that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great
ceremony,
is an infallible preventive of earthquakes.” Candide’s mentor, the
optimist
philosopher Pangloss, opines that it is all for the good, “all this is
for the
very best end, for if there is a volcano at Lisbon it could be in no
other
spot.” But when Pangloss is hanged for heresy, the earth shakes again.
Candide
laments: “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the
others
like?”

Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, author of The Social Contract and an early critic of
private
property, objected in a letter to Voltaire (August 1756) to the
latter’s
pessimism and rooted the effects of the disaster not in nature or in
human
nature but in social conditions:

“Without leaving your
Lisbon subject, concede, for example, that it was hardly nature who
assembled
there twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories. If the residents
of this
large city had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed, the
losses
would have been fewer or perhaps none at all. Everyone would have fled
at the
first shock, and would have been seen two days later, twenty leagues
away and
as happy as if nothing had happened. But we have to stay and expose
ourselves
to further tremors, many obstinately insisted, because what we would
have to
leave behind is worth more than what we could carry away. How many
unfortunates
perished in this disaster for wanting to take – one his clothing,
another his
papers, a third his money? They know so well that a person has become
the least
part of himself, and that he is hardly worth saving if all the rest is
lost.

“You would have liked –
and who would not have liked – the earthquake to have happened in the
middle of
some desert, rather than in Lisbon. Can we doubt that they also happen
in deserts?
But no one talks about those, because they have no ill effects for city
gentlemen (the only men about whom anyone cares anything).”

Immanuel Kant, also in
1756, wrote a series of three essays on the causes of earthquakes, in
which he
inveighed against those who consider these events “destined judgments
which the
desolated cities meet with on account of their evil deeds,” and “God’s
vengeance on these unfortunate persons, upon whom his justice pours out
all its
punishments of wrath.” Kant suggested instead that men should construct
buildings that accommodate themselves to natural phenomena. In addition
to the
treatises of philosophers, the destruction of Lisbon led to numerous
scientific
investigations into the causes of earthquakes.

In
Portugal, the Marquês de Pombal (Sebastião José de
Carvalho e Mello), the
autocratic chief minister who ruled the country for three decades,
turned to
practical matters, declaring the task of the hour to be: “Bury the dead
and
feed the living.” He proceeded to rebuild central Lisbon, and used the
events
to break the power of religious zealots, in particular the Jesuits,
whom he
exiled from Portugal in 1759. This had the beneficial effect of freeing
the
schools from Church control, and Portugal became the first country in
Europe to
build a secular education system. Pombal also instituted protectionist
policies
to make up for Portugal’s industrial backwardness. However, in 1777,
King
Joseph Emanuel dismissed his chief minister, restored the power of the
nobility
and the church and reversed Pombal’s industrial policies.

As modernizing autocrats
found their way blocked by the absolutist monarchies and decaying
aristocracies
of Europe, the intellectual ferment that became known as the
Enlightenment
began to flow outside official channels. Today, right-wing
reactionaries in
France beginning with François Furet want to blame the French
Revolution on the
Enlightenment – a bunch of free thinkers run amok, in their view – and
undo the
effects of both.2
This
is, of course, an idealist, anti-materialist view of history. The
French
Revolution was fundamentally the result of developing class
contradictions in
France and elsewhere in West Europe. The philosophes were no
radicals:
Voltaire wanted at most an enlightened monarch. But by questioning the
established order of church and king, the Enlightenment (itself the
product of
a growing bourgeoisie) was among the factors that only a few decades
later
facilitated a revolutionary upheaval. n

1 An
auto-da-fé (Portuguese for act of faith) was a rite of the
Catholic Inquisition in which the sentence was carried out, usually by
burning at the stake.

2 After the
French Revolution had run its course and the Bourbons were restored in
1814, the tombs of Voltaire and Rousseau in the Pantheon were broken
into and their remains removed in sacks and dumped in a pit outside
Paris where they were consumed by quicklime.